such a lot people think every little thing occurs for a cause. if it is "God's will","karma", or "fate," we wish to think that not anything on the earth, specially mess ups and tragedies, is a random, meaningless occasion. yet now, as by no means sooner than, convinced medical assertions that the realm embodies a profound contingency are difficult theological claims that God acts providentially on this planet. The random and meandering course of evolution is ordinary as a controversy that God didn't create life.

Abraham's Dice explores the interaction among probability and windfall within the monotheistic non secular traditions, taking a look at how their interplay has been conceptualized as our figuring out of the workings of nature has replaced. This full of life ancient dialog has generated extreme ongoing theological debates, and provocative responses from technological know-how: what are we to make of the background of our universe, the place probability and legislations have performed out in complicated methods? Or the evolution of lifestyles, the place random mutations have challenged makes an attempt to discover objective inside evolution and confident many who people are yet a "glorious accident"?

The enduring trust that every thing occurs for a cause is tested via a talk with significant students, between them holders of prestigious chairs at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the college of Basel, in addition to numerous Gifford academics, and Templeton prize winners. prepared traditionally, Abraham's cube presents a wide-ranging medical, theological, and biblical origin to deal with the query of windfall and divine motion in a global shot via with contingency.

This obtainable learn of Northern ecu shamanistic perform, or seidr, explores the best way the traditional Norse trust platforms evoked within the Icelandic Sagas and Eddas were rediscovered and reinvented through teams in Europe and North the US. The publication examines the phenomenon of altered realization and the interactions of seid-workers or shamanic practitioners with their spirit worlds.

Just about all the good spiritual thinkers of the previous have constructed a social in addition to theological doctrine, yet their sociology was once normally in simple terms implicit of their paintings or at most sensible part formulated in order that cautious research and research is required to convey it out. this is often the duty which Dr. Stark has set himself within the current essays.

This e-book considers the emergence of a awesome variety of church buildings in east-central Europe among the sixteenth and 18th centuries, which incorporated Catholic, Orthodox, Hussite, Lutheran, Bohemian Brethren, Calvinist, anti-Trinitarian and Greek Catholic groups. members examine the extreme multiplicity of confessions within the Transylvanian principality, in addition to the diversity of church buildings in Poland, Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary.